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The Past Is Not Dead, but Faulkner Case Against ‘Midnight in Paris’ Is Dismissed

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The Past Is Not Dead, but Faulkner Case Against ‘Midnight in Paris’ Is Dismissed

By Dave Itzkoff July 19, 2013 9:24 amJuly 19, 2013 9:24 am

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Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams in a scene from "Midnight in Paris."Credit Roger Arpajou/Sony Pictures Classics

A courtroom face-off between the film studio that released Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and the rights holders of William Faulkner’s novels did not yield any terrific legal sparks. But it may have produced a noteworthy literary creation in the form of a thoughtful and funny decision from the judge overseeing the case.

In October, Faulkner Literary Rights, the company that controls works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of “The Sound and the Fury” and “As I Lay Dying,” filed suit against Sony Pictures Classics, which released “Midnight in Paris,” in Federal District Court in Oxford, Miss. At issue was a single scene in Mr. Allen’s movie, in which a time-traveling character played by Owen Wilson says: “The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party.”

Faulkner Literary Rights said in its suit that this was an unauthorized use of a line from the author’s 1950 novel, “Requiem for a Nun,” which reads: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In dismissing this lawsuit on Thursday, Chief Judge Michael P. Mills of United States District Court in Mississippi said, in an opinion cited by The Hollywood Reporter, that the plaintiff had provided few facts in its complaint beyond descriptions of “Requiem for a Nun” and “Midnight in Paris,” and “threadbare recitals of elements.”

Judge Mills cited several instances in “Requiem for a Nun” in which the thematic idea of the past reappears (Faulkner describes it at one point as “something like a promissory note with a trick clause in it” that “can foreclose on you without warning”).

“Clearly, the quote in dispute, the second of these, is a fragment of the idea’s expression,” the judge wrote, adding: “Qualitative importance to society of a nine-word quote is not the same as qualitative importance to the originating work as a whole.”

Having viewed “Midnight in Paris” and read “Requiem for a Nun” in the course of the case, Judge Mills wrote that the court was “thankful that the parties did not ask the court to compare ‘The Sound and the Fury’ with ‘Sharknado.'”